Iss1/Ch3 How Many Cameroonians Does It Take to Change a Light Bulb? Trick Question: IMF Shut Off the Electricity

In Issue 1, we are trying to answer two questions. What caused Lake Chad’s catastrophic collapse? And why do so many Cameroonians lack access to clean drinking water?

In Chapter 1, we learned that desertification is the cause of Lake Chad’s collapse. Diversions for agriculture are the most significant immediate cause, but desertification has created the necessity of irrigating crops in the first place, creating a vicious cycle. We also learned about Cameroon’s lack of functioning democracy, high level of debt, and Paul Biya’s unwillingness to build infrastructure to meet his people’s needs, including clean drinking water.

However, the answers we found in Chapter 1 were merely superficial and left us with more questions. If desertification is so easy to reverse, why hasn’t it? And why is Cameroon a badly indebted, sham democracy?

By looking at the political history of Cameroon, we were able to answer some of these questions in Chapter 2 and Bonus Chapter 1. Cameroon is a sham democracy because French colonial administrators and Cameroonian elites made it that way. In Chapter 3, we will focus on the economic history of Cameroon, which will allow us to solve even more mysteries. Why is Cameroon so indebted? If desertification is such an easy problem to fix, why hasn’t it been fixed? If the diversions from the Chari-Logone river system are obviously unsustainable, why do they continue?

Ultimately, the forces that led to the shocking statistics covered in Chapter 1 are global phenomena. Though no country can be understood by merely looking at global trends, our understanding of Cameroon’s challenges will be so much more complete if we understand the pressures experienced in common by poor countries worldwide. Chapter 3 thus begins with the key problems that plague underdeveloped countries: a broken model of development that relies on commodities exports, high levels of debt, and austerity policies known as structural adjustments. After establishing general patterns and the worldwide span of the problem, we will return to Cameroon.

When the hottest commodity is human suffering

The dominant model of development imagines that poor countries can harness the free market to lift themselves out of poverty. Initially, poor countries have little to offer, but should take advantage of whatever they are able to produce that has a high price on the world market. These are known as commodities: poor countries blessed with mineral resources should mine and sell minerals to wealthy countries, and tropical countries should grow cash crops that the wealthy world wants but cannot grow themselves, like tea, coffee, cocoa, or bananas. 

Rather than producing what they need, farmers should specialize in a single cash crop. In theory, farmers are better off selling cash crops to people an ocean away because – with the cash they earn from selling on the world market – they will be able to buy and consume more. By participating in the free market, farmers’ consumption is no longer limited to what they can produce themselves.

After boosting the economy through selling commodities like tin ore and bananas, poor countries will gain the resources to invest in development in light industry, then heavy industry, and finally leave poverty behind. Based on this economic model, governments of poor countries relaxed restrictions on mining, and a combination of carrots and sticks induced farmers to switch from growing what they needed to growing what could be sold on the world market.

Though logical, this model of development simply doesn’t work. The model appeared to be working in the 1970s, but worldwide commodities prices collapsed in the 1980s, and the subsequent persistence of extreme poverty worldwide should permanently discredit this developmental model.

The 1980s collapse in commodities prices was catastrophic for three key reasons. First, by their nature commodities aren’t useful if they can’t be sold; you can’t feed your family with coffee or aluminum ore. Farmers that couldn’t sell their cash crops went hungry. Second, a collapse in commodities prices led to a collapse in wages for workers producing commodities, which accounted for a large share of the workforce in poor countries. And finally, because commodities had grown to account for so much of poor countries’ economies, a collapse in commodities prices was enough to send entire countries into a severe recession.

How severe? As outlined by Alfred Maizels in Commodities in Crisis, “the commodity price recession of the 1980s has been more severe, and considerably more prolonged, than that of the Great Depression of the 1930s.“ (p10-11) Moreover, by the 1980s, a far greater share of economic activity of developing countries was based on commodities than had been the case in the 1930s. In other words, for the world’s poorest countries, the commodities crisis of the 1980s led to an economic catastrophe more severe than the Great Depression.

It is no exaggeration to say that poor countries following the advice of experts experienced an economic crisis substantially worse than the Great Depression because they followed the advice of experts. These were countries that were following the rules and doing what they were told to do by economists and development specialists.

As a crucial counterexample, the East Asian Miracle economies followed a totally different model of development that was close to the exact opposite of the “best practices” of relying on commodity exports. Bad Samaritans by Cambridge economist Ha-joon Chang outlines the strategy of the East Asian Miracle economies – South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China – contrasting their development policies against the traditional development model. From the proliferation of state-owned enterprises, restrictions on foreign investment, the use of tariffs, and government ownership of land, the strategies used by the East Asian Miracle economies might as well be a list of the policies experts warned would ruin developing economies. Of course, the experts were wrong, and as a result of these heterodox policies, the East Asian Miracle countries went from underdeveloped backwaters to first world living standards in a single generation. For example, life expectancy in South Korea went from 56 in 1965 to 70 in 1990. Bad Samaritans is a must read for anyone concerned with global poverty.

While the cause of the collapse of commodities prices is beyond the scope of what we can cover here, for our purposes, it is clear that the development model that demands poor countries invest heavily in commodities exports is irredeemably flawed. A fundamental rethinking of development economics is needed. If you hold onto the orthodox view that development should occur in stages beginning with commodities exports, you are essentially saying, “I want all these poor people to make the things I want, like bananas or coffee, at subpoverty wages, forever, without any hope of improvement.”

With the severe recession created by the drop in commodities prices, tax revenues collapsed. Thus, on top of a dire – and worsening situation – poor countries were forced to look for options to borrow money, simply for the government to continue operating.

It’s crucial to emphasize once again that the countries following this developmental model were following the advice of experts. It is not the fault of a bauxite miner or cocoa plantation worker that commodities prices collapsed, yet they were the ones who suffered most.

These policies led to the Great Depression…what could go wrong?

Making a catastrophic situation even worse, economists and development experts – the very people who had caused the problem in the first place – were entrusted with designing a solution. They prescribed debt and structural adjustments. Structural adjustments forced poor countries to adopt what are known as austerity measures and “procyclical” economic policies. Austerity measures are cuts to government spending, including services people rely on for their survival. Massively unpopular, poor countries were forced to adopt austerity measures so severe that they never could have come to pass in wealthy countries. Procyclical economic policies had led to the Great Depression and had thus been totally discredited: no developed country used these policies any longer. Yet poor countries – already in the throes of an economic downturn more severe than the Great Depression – were literally forced to adopt the policies that had led to the Great Depression.

The story of debt and structural adjustments is becoming increasingly well-known and recognized for its extraordinary injustice. A major reason why poor countries are poor is because of debt and structural adjustments.

Broadly, private banks in the US and Europe started making loans to poor countries in the 1970s, and financial institutions had a clear preference for dictators. By the 1980s, much borrowing was justified as necessary to cover government shortfalls caused by the collapse in commodities prices. However, a great deal of borrowing was simply a scam, with dictators using the borrowed money to fund lavish lifestyles and build commercial empires, leaving their subjects to pay back the loans. The most notorious examples occurred in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and the Philippines. In Zaire, the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko simply deposited the borrowed money in a Swiss bank account. Mobutu looted around $5 billion, living like a king while his people went hungry, with no intention of paying back the money he borrowed. In the Philippines, dictator Ferdinand Marcos looted an estimated $5 to $10 billion, earning his place in the Guinness Book of World Records under “greatest robbery of a government.”

By the 1980s and 1990s, the dictators like Mobutu and Marcos who had taken out the loans had largely been overthrown. Nonetheless, even though the loans were taken out by dictators without any sort of consent from the population, poor countries were expected to pay back their dictator’s loans. There is no conceivable moral code wherein the people forced to live under a dictatorship should be forced to pay back that dictator’s loans after heroically overthrowing the dictator. The setup was even more outrageous because the banks knew the dictators were crooks. The dictators obviously had no intention of paying back their loans, but the banks made the loans anyway.

For a particularly outrageous example, the Apartheid regime in South Africa borrowed tens of billions of dollars for military and police hardware to repress the majority black African country; only white South Africans, representing a small minority, were allowed to vote. Once Apartheid fell, the new government was expected to pay back the loans the Apartheid regime had taken out to buy tanks and billy clubs to repress them. Similar outrageous stories occurred worldwide in former colonies as well as in former Soviet Union countries.

The injustice of repaying someone else’s debts was compounded, however, when poor countries found themselves too poor to make loan payments. The private banks that had made the original loans were not willing to refinance when the loan terms ended, so poor countries were forced to turn to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank to refinance. As a condition of making  loans, the IMF and World Bank obligated poor countries to accept structural adjustments. Poor countries were forced to cut spending on public programs, like healthcare or subsidies for food; they were forced to adopt discredited “procyclical” economic policies known to cause and worsen recessions; public utilities had to be sold to voracious transnational corporations, resulting in higher prices and worse service. Among the more notorious examples of structural adjustments is Zimbabwe:

Zimbabwe’s health system, for example, was doing extremely well during the 1980s, when primary health care was a priority and hundreds of health facilities were built. In fact, the government aimed at building so many health centers that no Zimbabwean would have to walk more than 10 miles to the next health center. By the early 1990s, in fact, all citizens, even in the rural areas, did not have to walk more than 0.5 miles to the closest health facility.

Moreover, health care was free at the point of service – any Zimbabwean would be treated without any out-of-pocket costs in any hospital or clinic. However, in 1990, Zimbabwe – unable to afford its debt payments – was forced to accept a loan from the IMF in order to refinance its debt. As a condition of making the loan, the IMF forced Zimbabwe to accept several structural adjustments, including the introduction of cost sharing of 50 Zimbabwe dollars for outpatient care and 200 Zimbabwe dollars for a day in the hospital. This cost sharing was totally unaffordable to some of the poorest people on earth. Another structural adjustment obligated Zimbabwe to dramatically cut government spending on health care. The results were disastrous:

In Zimbabwe, IMF loan acceptance also led to a rise in the price of all imported drugs and hospital equipment, making them four times more expensive partly due to devaluation of the currency. At the time, Media Guild argued that user fees and the higher cost of essential drugs resulted in a lower rate of preventive and curative care the poor needed and an increase in the number of deaths…As a result [of the structural adjustments], government subsidies to health in Zimbabwe decreased by 14% between 1990 and 1992, and then by 29% during 1992 and 1993.

Overall, spending on healthcare in Zimbabwe was cut in half.

In Debt, London School of Economics anthropologist David Graber details how 10,000 people died in a single malaria outbreak in Madagascar that would have been prevented by a program that had been eliminated due to structural adjustments. Bad Samaritans (the book cited above) – the best introductory work on structural adjustment and development – notes that when IMF structural adjustments forced South Korea to adopt procyclical economic policies (the very policies that led to the Great Depression), unemployment immediately tripled and businesses went bankrupt at a rate of 100 per day – a crash only partly reversed when the IMF loosened its structural adjustments. Though the Rwandan Genocide defies easy explanation and has no single cause, the severe economic recession – initially caused by the collapse in commodities prices and substantially worsened by IMF structural adjustments – was clearly a contributing factor to the turmoil in Rwanda that produced the genocide.

From Zimbabwe to Madagascar to South Korea, structural adjustments have a clear track record of failure: they do not, as advocates claim, result in increased efficiency of health, education, or other sectors, nor do they improve economic conditions. Not only do structural adjustments have the opposite effect as advertised, they literally kill people. When public health researchers performed a systematic review of the research on structural adjustments, they reached this scathing conclusion:

[S]tructural adjustment programmes have a detrimental impact on child and maternal health. In particular, these programmes undermine access to quality and affordable healthcare and adversely impact upon social determinants of health, such as income and food availability. The evidence suggests that a fundamental rethinking is required by international financial institutions[.]

The scale of the problem is colossal. As documented in 2024 by UN Trade and Development, poor countries owe an astonishing $29 trillion, paying a whopping $847 billion in interest payments each year, mostly to wealthy private investors in wealthy countries. Poor countries pay extortionary interest rates on their debt; for the Latin America and Caribbean region, interest rates average 6.8%, and for Africa, 9.8%. By comparison, a major contributing factor to the American student loan crisis is the high interest rates on public student loans, which stand at 5.8%, or well below the rates forced on poor countries.

With so much money owed at extortionary interest rates, there is no realistic possibility of repaying the loans. Indeed, interest rates are so high that the original loan amounts have been paid back several times over, but due to compounding interest, the amount owed has only grown. There is simply no justification for expecting some of the poorest people on earth to sacrifice their basic needs to pay loans owned by some of the richest people on earth.

Is that a banana in your economy or are you just happy to see me?

To see how these forces played out in Cameroon, it is necessary to understand that Cameroon had been doing very well economically prior to the collapse in commodities prices. Under Ahmaduo Ahidjo, the dictator the French installed in 1957, whom we met last chapter, Cameroon placed among the highest incomes and economic growth among African countries at the time. Yet as with the political system, Ahidjo slowly and methodically expanded his domination over the economy. He nationalized much of the economy – placing it under his direct control – and continued to expand state-owned enterprises – which he also directly controlled.

Of course, there is no reason to believe that Ahidjo’s plundering was anything other than a drag on the economy. Cameroon did well in spite of Ahidjo’s looting of the economy, not because of it. Economic growth was so strong during Ahidjo’s tenure that he could be a kleptocrat and most Cameroonians could still do well enough economically.

Yet even if Ahidjo’s policies were somehow beneficial, there is no amount of economic growth that can justify the level of repression in Ahidjo’s Cameroon. In Bonus Chapter 2, we traced the darkly fascinating story of how Ahidjo consolidated his power across Cameroonian society. While this chapter of Cameroon’s history is engrossing, it is important not to lose sight of the true nature of Ahidjo’s rule. We concluded Bonus Chapter 2 with two experts’ observations. Political scientist Richard Joseph:

“[T]he political order which exists is maintained by a powerful military presence, a ubiquitous secret service, the ruthless repression of any form of political opposition, the use of torture and concentration camps, and a rigid censorship of all forms of expression.”

And International Studies scholar Mark Delancey:

“It is difficult, probably impossible, to give any accurate measure of repression. How frequently were people imprisoned for their political views? How many secret police and informers were there? Such questions are not answered in government reports and budgets. But certain results are clear. The Cameroon population widely believed that government spies were omnipresent and that the government made widespread use of torture and imprisonment to destroy any potential opposition…Friends would stop conversations in cafes or bars, noting that it was not wise to discuss certain topics in public. Were there really spies in class or at the next table in the cafe? In one respect, it did not matter. The people were afraid to speak freely.”

Unfortunately, much of the economy was based on commodities exports – primarily cacao, coffee, bananas, and rubber – and early in his successor Paul Biya’s tenure, global prices for those commodities collapsed. With so much of the Cameroonian economy depending on commodities exports, the entire system crashed. Cameroon became one of the poorest countries on earth. When combined with rule by a kleptocratic dictator and the crippling effects of the CFA franc, the commodities crisis gave rise to the shocking statistics discussed in Chapter 1. Whereas Ahidjo could skim cream off the top of a booming economy, Biya’s looting took food out of Cameroonians’ mouths.

Obviously, the collapse of world commodities prices in the early 1980s was not the fault of any Cameroonian, even though many Cameroonians lost everything and went hungry as a result.

Cameroon’s experience with debt and structural adjustments

Cameroon’s experience with debt and structural adjustments mirrors the global trends. The first similarity is the impossibility of full repayment. Cameroon’s initial loan amounts have been paid several times over, and even though between a fifth and a quarter of all government revenue goes to paying debts, Cameroon still owes more than it initially borrowed due to compounding interest rates. The debts cannot be repaid, and attempting to repay them takes scarce money away from other priorities like health or sanitation, in a country that is already one of the poorest in the world. We discussed at length in Chapter 1 Cameroon’s struggles with drinking water and sanitation. There will never be money available for improving access to drinking water and sanitation when so much is spent on debt servicing.

The second similarity is how corrupt political elites have used the loans to enrich themselves. For Cameroon, the primary beneficiary is – unsurprisingly – Paul Biya. However, whereas Marcos and Mobutu were brazen with their theft of loaned money, Biya’s theft was never obvious. When Cameroon got its first round of loans in 1989, Biya didn’t follow Mbotu’s strategy and directly pocket any of the $150 million Cameroon received. Instead, Biya allowed the money to circulate in the economy, knowing that his control of every corner of Cameroon would ensure that he would eventually be able to capture some of the loaned money.

Third, structural adjustments have done substantial harm to Cameroon. For example, the IMF forced Cameroon to privatize its public electricity utility, though this was not completed until 2001. Privatization was supposed to improve service and lower costs. However, the utility was sold to an American company without competitive bidding and the actual terms of the purchase were never made public. The opacity of the deal reeks of corruption, and the worst suspicions – that government officials accepted bribes to give its new owner favorable terms  – are not unreasonable. Once privatized, electricity costs increased by more than 10% and service deteriorated, with Cameroonians going days without electricity.

The direct line from structural adjustments to desertification

While we could literally write a book on the injustice of structural adjustments in Cameroon, our interest in volume 1 is freshwater. Thus, we will only consider structural adjustments that worsened desertification, and there is indeed a direct line from certain structural adjustment policies to desertification. A 2007 working paper by the World Bank bluntly describes the fallout of structural adjustments to the agricultural sector, starting with severe cuts to agricultural research. “Despite the promising results recorded by Cameroonian research programs, and despite the desperate need for yield-increasing technologies at that time,” Cameroon was forced to cut public funding for agricultural research by 59%. Fortunately, agricultural research institutions were able to offset much of this lost funding by applying to funding sources outside of Cameroon. Nonetheless, it is outrageous for a country with so much hunger and so much desertification to slash funding for research to address those problems.

Of far greater consequence was the elimination of two key agriculture programs. First, Cameroon had a national agriculture bank that made loans to farmers, allowing them to make investments in their farms that would increase yields in the long term. Obviously, remote areas of one of the world’s poorest countries will not have access to a bank, so a public agriculture bank is the only possibility for Cameroon’s rural farmers to get credit in order to improve farming practices. The IMF’s structural adjustments forced Cameroon to liquidate this bank. The World Bank notes that without the agricultural bank, “Smaller and more remote farmers have no access at all to formal credit” (emphasis added). Astonishingly, the IMF and World Bank believed that structural adjustments would dramatically improve and expand Cameroonian agriculture, even as they were fully eliminating farmers’ access to credit.

As discussed in Chapter 1, desertification can be very cheaply and easily reversed by tractors with specialized plows that break up compacted soil. Breaking up the soil allows plants to take root and the desertification process to reverse. However, as one of the poorest countries on earth, even this rudimentary equipment is financially out of reach for rural Cameroonians. Were it still around, Cameroon’s public agricultural bank could be making loans for farmers to buy the tractors and plows needed to reverse desertification and restore the land’s ability to support agriculture. As the World Bank itself admits, without the agricultural bank, this is simply impossible.

Second, Cameroon had a nation-wide public agricultural education system to teach farmers new techniques and best practices. The IMF structural adjustments forced Cameroon to liquidate this program. We can imagine a public agricultural education system teaching farmers how to combat desertification and how to access loans from the agricultural bank in order to obtain the equipment needed to do so. We can imagine public servants troubleshooting with Cameroonian farmers, and demonstrating techniques that work.

In short, by forcing the liquidation of the national agricultural bank and the public agricultural education system, the IMF’s structural adjustments took away the tools that could solve the desertification crisis.

The American Dust Bowl vs the Sahelian Dust Bowl

As we mentioned in Chapter 1, desertification of the Sahel is exactly the same phenomenon that led to the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s. The American Dust Bowl created incalculable economic damage and displaced 2.5 million people. This catastrophe spurred the creation of the Soil Conservation Service, a crucial but often-forgotten part of the New Deal. Now known as the Natural Resources Conservation Service, it created large-scale experiments demonstrating the value of soil conservation practices such as terracing and contouring and supported farmers in adopting sound soil conservation practices. Thousands of employees of the Civilian Conservation Corps – another key New Deal program – provided countless hours of labor on Soil Conservation Service projects helping farmers to reverse land degradation. The National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska estimates that the amount of money spent by the federal government combating the physical effects of the Dust Bowl, as well as mitigating the economic fallout may have reached a billion dollars, not adjusted for inflation. Adjusted for inflation, that would be $19 billion spent ending the Dust Bowl. The result was a complete success: the American Midwest is once again one of the most productive agricultural regions of the entire world.

This comparison matters because when the United States faced a crisis identical to the one facing Cameroon, we used deficit spending to throw an astounding amount of money and labor at the problem, creating new programs to research and help farmers implement anti-desertification agricultural practices. Compare the New Deal to Cameroon’s structural adjustments, wherein the IMF forced Cameroon to liquidate its agricultural education system as well as its agricultural bank and to dramatically scale back on agricultural research. Cameroon’s agricultural bank and public agricultural education programs were set up to do the same thing as the Soil Conservation Service: in other words, the IMF has literally forced Cameroon to do the exact opposite of the Dust Bowl’s proven solution to desertification.

Imagine if the United States never spent a billion dollars, not adjusted for inflation, in the 1930s to deal with the Dust Bowl catastrophe, and instead had to adopt the measures Cameroon did at the behest of faraway bureaucrats at the IMF or World Bank. Had the US been forced to deal with the Dust Bowl the way Cameroon has been forced to deal with its identical land degradation crisis, the American midwest could well be as poor as Cameroon. As has actually played out in Cameroon, there would have been no way to reverse the Dust Bowl, and the rural Midwest would probably be facing as bleak circumstances as the rural Sahel.

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In 2005, the Sahelian countries started the Great Green Wall Initiative, which initially planned to fully reverse desertification in a 15km strip on the northern edge of the Sahel, the entire 7000 km from the Atlantic coast to the Indian coast. This was later expanded to encompass just under a third of the entire Sahel. To fully restore the entire Great Green Wall focus area by 2030 would require approximately $3.6 to 4.3 billion per year. Unfortunately – and, unsurprisingly – the initiative is grossly underfunded and falling far, far behind its goals, simply due to lack of money.

Poverty means irresponsible decisions are forced

Overall, the situation for a typical rural Cameroonian is dire. Cameroonians have to work fields a great distance from their homes, but these fail to provide adequate income and they are thus forced to take on second jobs in addition to their grueling farm work without the benefit of modern farming machinery. With such a dire situation in rural Cameroon, the questions we posed earlier have logical answers. If overgrazing, inadequate fallow periods and farming on marginal lands eke out a little extra revenue this year but inevitably cause desertification and zero revenue in the long term, why do they continue?

Because rural Sahelians are barely surviving and have no choice but to make irresponsible choices. Plant a field you know should be fallow or go hungry. Farm land you know cannot support crops or go hungry. Overgraze your livestock or go hungry. Harold Dregne, the land degradation expert we met in Chapter 1, notes that many Sahelian pastoralists were forced off their land by expanding agricultural interests, and overgrazing is the inevitable result when people who make their living off of livestock are suddenly restricted to a smaller amount of pasture.

In addition to the timber trade, deforestation here has a second major cause: poverty. With scarce access to electricity and electrical appliances like stoves or microwaves, Sahelians have no choice but to cook with firewood. No one can ask Sahelians to stop chopping down the Sahel’s precious trees, because to do so would mean being unable to cook and eat. Irresponsible decisions on deforestation are forced by a lack of infrastructure. In other words, expanding access to electricity could ease deforestation, but as discussed above, structural adjustments worsened access to electricity, thus increasing the demand for firewood. More importantly, a public utility exists to serve the public and – if the political climate were ever right – could expand service into rural areas where it is not profitable to do so. Obviously, a profit-seeking private electrical utility lacks any responsibility to the public and will not expand to rural Cameroon. Human need and the imperative to fight deforestation will always be secondary to quarterly earnings.

Conclusion

To conclude, let’s again consider just how unfair this situation is. Cameroon was pushed into a catastrophic recession due to a collapse in commodities prices, for which no one in Cameroon was responsible. As a result, the economy collapsed and millions of Cameroonians were impoverished. The recession led to reduced tax revenues, so the government of Cameroon ran deficits and was forced to take on loans that came with grossly unfair structural adjustment conditions and impossible loan payments, further collapsing the economy and impoverishing Cameroonians.

Were the American Dust Bowl dealt with as Cameroon is forced to deal with its identical land degradation crisis, the American Dust Bowl would never have ended. The American midwest could well be facing circumstances as bleak as the rural Sahel. All the while, Paul Biya has found ways to enrich himself while his people go without. In the end, Cameroon went from being one of the richest countries in Africa to one of the poorest countries in the entire world.

It’s worth repeating that we have only examined the structural adjustments that directly affected desertification. There were many more structural adjustments that did enormous damage to Cameroon in other parts of life and the economy.

With this knowledge, we have finally solved the mysteries posed for Issue 1 because we have finally uncovered the underlying causes. In Chapter 1, we learned that Lake Chad collapsed due to irresponsible diversions for agriculture and desertification; desertification is in turn caused by irresponsible agricultural practices. Here in Chapter 3, we learned that the root cause of these irresponsible agricultural practices is poverty. Poverty forces Sahelians to make irresponsible agricultural decisions to avoid going hungry. Poverty is in turn a predictable outcome of a broken model of development economics, high levels of public debt, structural adjustments, and a kleptocratic single party government.

Solving the mysteries of Issue 1 has led to two very disturbing questions about global climate change. What does it mean that our worst fears of climate change – collapsing ecosystems and people going without drinking water – are already happening? And if climate change can’t be stopped without reversing the desertification of the Sahel – remember, land degradation is responsible for a quarter of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions – why does the developed world show so little concern, even out of raw self interest? The final chapter of Issue 1 will address these last questions.

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When discussing global poverty, it can be hard to keep perspective. These these are real people in real places. To help us keep a healthy perspective, we’re ending with a focus on Cameroonian culture. Cameroon has a rich food culture and the YouTube channel Tee’s Secrets has dozens of Cameroonian recipes. Here’s Tee Tee herself making groundnut (peanut) soup with beef:

Tee Tee also has recipes for the more adventurous, such as this one for Cameroonian snail stew: